This is Liam Guilar's Blog, mostly about poetry, mine and other people's, and anything else of interest. Over the years it has unintentionally developed into an online poetry resource, check the names in the sidebar but Bunting, Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Tennyson and the medieval poets get fair coverage. Lady Godiva and Me was a sequence of poems that linked Lady Godiva, both the historical Godgifu and the legendary Lady G, to a character growing up in the city of Coventry after the second world war.
You can see a short film about the collection Here.
My most recent book of poems, Anhaga is published by Vanzenopress and avialable from my website. Further information, full length articles and sample poems are available on my website Here .

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Monday, October 28, 2013

'Poetry" by David Constantine. Defending Poetry yet again.

Poetry, by David Constantine, OUP, 2013.

I read this book cheering from the
sidelines. Constantine writes eloquently, he advances a coherent argument, as a
translator and poet his examples are taken from a different range than usual
(Brecht and Holderein play a significant part ) and the book rises to a
triumphant eloquent end:

That
is why the defense of poetry entails the larger campaign for a humane habitat
in which it may flourish to its heart’s content, abundantly saying the human
and not Just as an answering back
against the inhumane, but also-why not?-in celebration of a society we are glad
and proud of. Is that too much to
ask? Too much or not enough. We want more than mere survival , we want our due,
our redress, lives fit to be looked at, and poetry will help, poetry at the
heart of social life. We don’t want poetry to be read by a dwindling few but by
an increasing many. We want it commonplace, companionable, always there to be
turned to, in our ordinary lives, customary and working wonders, 9p139)

Applause applause, the crowd goes wild,
rises to its feet, and the sound of isolated clapping in an almost empty
theatre echoes disconcertingly.

There are generic problems which all books
like this one face. The first is simple and devastating. Who is reading it? I
suspect, even resent the use of the first person plural, it’s an insidious
positioning technique, but who is this “we”?

“A large part of my endeavor will consist
in trying to persuade any who need persuading that poetry springs from and
belongs in the heart of society and that it does good there.”(p3)

I suspect that the only people who read
books like this are people like me who want to believe them, andstudents whose professors or teachers
want to believe them. The people who don’t believe that poetry is important,
are hardly going to shell out for a book like this, let alone read it. Or be
impressed by the arguments.

The second obvious generic problem is that
the Defense of Poetry,from Sidney
to now, implies that poetry can only be justified if it has an external
political or linguistic effect that is measurable in the world beyond the
poem.If only we all read
Poetry,the argument has gone on
drearily for over four hundred years, the world would be a better place and
language would be so much better.

Such claims, from Sir Philip Sidney's to the present
day,are either wishful thinking,
unsubstantiated either by external evidence or understandings of how language or culture actually work,or built from very
specific cases where context was so important, argued into a generality.Constantine tends towards the latter: a
specific type of poem will have a specific type of effect on a specific type of
reader which will produce a political reaction.It’s the last improbable step that will justify‘Poetry’.

And finally, Poetry. Never the sum of all
poems, but an abstraction, which becomes the active subject in the sentence,
(in the quote above it has intentions and a heart).As someone said, you have to pretend the butterfly is an
elephant, except everyone outside the seminar room can see it’s a butterfly.

So it’s been interesting to read this
defense while reading four new single author collections of poems. One is “Award
Winning”. Two are “poetry society recommendations”. All are published by well-regarded
publishers. All four are written by writers who teach in University Creative Writing

Programs.

Do they live up to Constantine’s claims, or
Eliot’s, or Pound’s, or Dan Gioia, or Sidney’s or Shelley’s? No, they are
poems, Not POETRY.

And like a great deal of modern poetry,
whether it’s Avant-Garde, or Mainstream: Look at me say the poets, look at me, I’ve
written a poem. Tick the boxes that prove this is a poem: it swims as a block
of text in a white space, I handle rhyme with care, I look at the world aslant,
I pretend to have had poetic thoughts about mundane things. I use enough Syntactic variation to
ensure you notice, and of course the occasional unusual verb.

One out of four goes in for heavy duty
typographical play: this signals that these poems are “innovative” or
“experimental”.

Four books of poems, bought, read and then reread with attention over a two week period, and not one poem sticks
in my head. Not one offered me anything more in return for my money and
attention than the spectacle of a writer proving they can write something that
is recognizable as a poem. On page
after page.

If I go to a concert I assume the singer
can hold a note, sing in tune, get through a song. I take it for granted that
the singer knows what a song is and can sing one. I expect more than this
simple demonstration.

The gulf between the claims for Poetry and poems
which are published is so vast that it’s unbridgeable.

And perhaps the reason why so few people
read poetry, or care about it, is that it offers the reader so little in return
for money and attention. The
majority of modern published poetry is not “Difficult”. It’s just not worth
reading.